Free Mindgame by Anthony Horowitz Page A

about your wife.
    STYLER: No!
    FARQUHAR: Yes!
    STYLER: She’s got nothing to do with this.
    FARQUHAR: She was ‘your other half’ wasn’t she? How can I understand you when there’s a whole half that isn’t here?
    STYLER: What do you want to know?
    FARQUHAR: Everything. What was she like in bed?
    STYLER: You’re disgusting.
    FARQUHAR: ( Threatening .) Tell me…
    STYLER: There is nothing to tell you.
    FARQUHAR: What?
    STYLER: Alright. You want the truth? Well there were no ‘sexual relations’. That’s why we split up.
    FARQUHAR: Was she ugly?
    STYLER: No.
    FARQUHAR: But she didn’t turn you on.
    STYLER: It wasn’t my fault.
    FARQUHAR: ‘Blaming Jane’ are we?
    STYLER: I’m not blaming anyone.
    FARQUHAR: Why didn’t you have sex?
    STYLER: We did, but…
    FARQUHAR: Go on.
    STYLER: No.
    A pause.
    FARQUHAR: Are you queer?
    STYLER: That’s a horrible word. Nobody uses that word any more.
    FARQUHAR: Well maybe I’m thirty years out of date. ( Pause .) Why does it bother you? From what I’m told, nobody cares anymore anyway so what’s the big deal? ( Pause .) Gay. Is that any better? That’s what you were going to call me,Mark. That was the theory you were going to put in your book. But maybe it’s Mr Pot and Mrs Kettle. Maybe the boot’s on the other foot.
    STYLER: You’re wrong…
    FARQUHAR: You couldn’t get it up! That’s why your wife left you.
    STYLER: No.
    FARQUHAR: And you wanted to kill her because she knew you for the impotent, the impotent little mother’s boy that you were. But you didn’t dare do it in real life. You didn’t have the guts so you fantasized. You wrote a book…
    STYLER: No, no, no.
    FARQUHAR: Yes. I’ve read it. I’ve read Blaming Jane . Dr Farquhar had it here in his desk and I picked it up and I read it.
    STYLER: You’re lying.
    FARQUHAR: It’s the truth.
    STYLER: Then where is it? Show it to me.
    FARQUHAR: I lent it to Borson. ( Pause .) He’s enjoying it too. You see, it takes one to know one and we can recognise something in it. You don’t want to admit it. Of course you don’t want to admit it. But deep down inside you, don’t you think that perhaps you’re just a tiny little bit like us?
    STYLER: No!
    FARQUHAR: Then maybe not a tiny bit. Maybe a lot.
    STYLER: No!
    FARQUHAR: And maybe you’re not alone.
    A pause.
    Mark… Consider your situation… Here you are, completely in the power of the most dangerous man in the country — and here I’m quoting the Sun and they should know. I told you before that I was thinking of leaving the asylum. We all are. Midnight tonight and the whole lot of us are going to disappear. We were just getting ready, making the last preparations over in B-wing, when you arrived. It’s all been a bit like the Colditz Story really, though without the bonhomie.
    STYLER: When you go…what will happen to me?
    FARQUHAR: Well, it seems to me that there are two possibilities. The first is that I kill you. Cut open an artery and leave you to bleed to death. But there is another possibility. And that’s that I set you free.
    STYLER: Easterman, please…
    FARQUHAR: ( Interrupting .) But by setting you free, I don’t just mean taking off the strait-jacket. I’m talking about liberating you. This is the moment. It’s got to be now. There’ll never be another time.
    STYLER: Liberate me?
    FARQUHAR: Right now you can tell me anything and everything. Nobody will ever know except you and me. We have that wonderful intimacy, Mark. The intimacy of the writer and his subject, of the killer and the killed. Right now you can say things and do things that you may have dreamed of all your life but have never dared to say or do because now, here, there are only the two of us and we can’t even be sure which one of us is actually mad.
    A pause.
    STYLER: I have nothing to